There Are No New Brand Stories.
There Are No New Brand Stories.
The Odyssey is hardly fresh material. Homer’s epic has been translated, studied and adapted for the best part of three millennia. Its ingredients are familiar enough: a hero trying to get home, a long-suffering wife, a wildly inefficient journey and several mythical creatures with very little respect for the itinerary.
Brand stories are not so different. Heritage, provenance, ingredients, craftsmanship, transformation, rebellion and belonging have all been doing the rounds for quite some time. Few brands possess a story that has never been told before. The real challenge is not absolute originality. It is finding a fresh reason for people to care.
Christopher Nolan seems to understand that. Plenty of people criticised his version before seeing it, taking issue with the casting, costumes, dialogue and supposed lack of historical accuracy. A curious standard to impose on a story involving gods, sorceresses and a one-eyed giant, but the debate gathered pace all the same. And perhaps it helped.
The controversy did not shrink the film’s cultural presence. It enlarged it, to the tune of $263.8 million in its opening weekend. Whatever part the debate played, audiences were not simply being offered The Odyssey. They were being offered Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, complete with his appetite for scale, physical spectacle, psychological darkness and asking audiences to surrender a substantial portion of the afternoon.
A whisky may have been made in the same place for two hundred years. A skincare brand may contain a rare ingredient. A family business may have passed its knowledge between generations. These are facts, and perfectly respectable ones. But facts do not become stories until someone decides what they mean now.
That act of selection is where creative value begins. Which part of the history matters? What has been repeated until it has lost all force? Which detail, ritual or contradiction could make people see the brand differently? What does this story say about the business today, rather than simply where it came from?
What it cannot independently possess is Nolan’s relationship with the story. It has not spent a career thinking about time, memory, obsession and spectacle. It has no childhood encounter with mythology, no private fear and no stubborn artistic concern it has been trying to resolve for thirty years. It knows the material. It does not have a reason to retell it.
That is the difficulty for brand storytelling too. AI can assemble the facts, identify the conventions and reproduce the expected codes. It can surface the heritage, organise the research and present every available ingredient. Everything may be present except the storyteller. And that’s what every story needs. Someone to decide what matters, what can be left behind and what fresh meaning can be created from the material. It is why two agencies can receive the same research and produce completely different work. The information may be shared. The interpretation is not.
The absence of a storyteller also changes how the work feels. Nolan has spoken about younger filmmakers “utterly rejecting” what they call “AI slop”, just as many are rediscovering analogue craft and hands-on filmmaking. His point is not that analogue methods are automatically virtuous, or that every new technology should be marched off the premises. It is that audiences recognise when creative work contains genuine human commitment.
We can sense when somebody has gone looking for the story rather than simply generated a version of it. That commitment matters in branding too.
When we worked on Freixenet, visiting the vineyards and production sites allowed us to see how the brand’s history lived in its environment, rituals and details. The way people spoke about the product. The habits they took for granted. The small things nobody had thought to put in the brief. That is where authenticity comes from. It does not come from prompting “Mediterranean heritage, but contemporary.”
AI can show us how a category has traditionally told its stories. Designers must decide which traditions to honour, which to challenge and which deserve to be sent home by sea.
These decisions carry risk. The moment someone brings a strong perspective to a familiar story, people may disagree with it. They may argue about accuracy, tone or whether the source has been treated with sufficient reverence. That is not necessarily evidence that the story has failed. In fact, it may be proof that someone has made a choice visible enough to matter.
I’m not saying brands should not court controversy for its own sake. There is already quite enough of that rattling around the internet. But they should be willing to take a position. To refresh what is familiar. To recognise that telling a timeless story is not the same as keeping it motionless.
After three thousand years, The Odyssey did not need another faithful summary. It needed somebody with a point of view. So does your brand.
